The limitations of reason?

[audiognostic]

yes but its not really divorced from personal bias..

because even though we may not be making emotional decisions.. we are making rational decisions BASED on emotion.. Value judgments being in essense emotional.. as I have tried to state from the beggining..

Therefore the choice of career paths is.. which path is more emotionally gratifying..

Therefore we have primacy of emotions/primacy of passion.. since that is the entire basis of the value judgments upon which our reason is based on in the first place..

As Nietzsche said.. the purpose of reason is not to null out our passions.. but rather to maximize them.. passion being the primary drive..

Otherwise explain to me how a value judgement such as that career choice decision becomes anything other than emotional..

path 1 being an emotional decision to place ones existence and saftey above everything.. path 2 being an emotional decision to place the emotional gratifications of ones work above everything.. that is also where Im saying Rands theorem falls apart.. as she chooses for you.. to place your life above everything.. when really that in itself is a subjective choice to work from... she already chose career path #1...since according to her premise.. that is the correct career path since it directly promotes ones own well being.. whereas the other career path potentially risks ones own well being for a simple emotional satisfaction... she says no value judgement can be higher than ones own existence and well being..

Its very similar to selfishness vs altruism.. the essence is either a subjective decision to place ones life above everything, or anothers life above everything.. if Rand was to call altruism objectively wrong.. she would also have to call career path #2 objectively wrong.. since it potentially sacrifices own well being for a "greater cause" which is not directly related to ones own well being, but rather his "emotional" well being.. which in itself is not decided through reason, but simply IS... as one cannot simply decide to like engineering better than art if he has an inner drive to be an artist and not an engineer.. same with Altruism.. lets say someones emotional drive is to place the llives of others ahead of his own.. as I see it that becomes his decision to make and is objectively neither right nor wrong

Or even take the dichotomy in virtue of selfishness.. of whether to save a loved one drowning or not if you risk your own life.. she says.. if you cannot live without the loved one then do it.. but you cannot live without them EMOTIONALLY.. NOT materially.. you dont rescue a loved one because they are paying your bills.. but for EMOTIONAL reasons.. therefore the primacy of the choice again becomes emotional..

what if your need for emotional gratification for your career choice is the same.? that you cannot live unless you have the emotional gratification from your career choice? does it become reasonable to risk your well being to pursue that career? and if so.. isnt that just primacy of passion?

do you see what im getting at? maybe im missing something..

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

... and just answer my questions.. how about that

Pope,

Are you going to do here the way you did on puahate and keep antagonizing people until they come down on you like a ton of bricks, you get paranoid and start saying others are stalking you, then finally you admit you don't know what the hell you are talking about and beg for mercy? Are you going to offer me money in the end, like you did there, to take your crap down and make all the bad stuff stop?

This is called a neurotic script and you seem to be hell-bent on playing it on OL.

I feel sorry for you. I truly do. You are a product of modern education where you get a prize and lots of applause just for showing up. They taught you that you don't have to be good at what you do, that merit doesn't count. That all you have to do is be loud and people will lavish praise on you.

But out in the real world, it doesn't work like that. So you play with what you know, i.e., a neurotic script, to get attention. It ain't perfect, but it does get you attention. And, since I don't believe you are a total waste of a human being, the blow up, humiliation and your groveling at the end salves your guilt for faking shit all over the place.

I have no problem answering your questions, which I have done several times (with you saying you agree 100%). But I have no patience for your mind games.

Get serious, dude, and people will engage you seriously. The road you're on right now goes nowhere but in circles.

Michael

[Xray]

and trust me im no crappy amateur musican .. you can hear some of my work on this site: http://ilmatikmusic.webs.com/ check it out.. check out this bmw commercial demo soundtrack I made in my spare time.. BMW is my favorite car.. I have no idea why..

You really have no idea why? I'm convinced that you could list many features which make this type of car so very appealing to you.

I used the visuals to inspire the sounds.. HOW did this happen? NO IDEA.. explain that

The visuals which show movement have a certain synchronization with the type of music chosen (the music 'fits' the visuals because one can associate both 'dynamic power' as well as 'continuous motion' with it).

Your brain obviously had definite reasons not to create to a dynamic car speeding along a tune sounding like a slow lullaby ...

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Xray,

Pope has just now been banned. See here.

Michael

[caroljane]

Fast work Michael. How did you track that down? I noticed when you said he was faking it but I didn't realise it was that much faking,

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Carol,

I just added an EDIT to my post. There's some more entertainment to be had.

But, to answer your question, I've been burned before (meaning here OL has been burned before) and the signs were all there. So I checked with my magic Search Engine Decoder Ring.

Michael

[Dglgmut]

He should have cited the source, but I don't think he was trying to put anything over on anyone... I mean, have you seen his grammar?

I hope you let him still read these forums, at least.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

... I don't think he was trying to put anything over on anyone...

Heh.

Famous last words.

Michael

(EDIT: Dglgmut, It occurs to me you might misunderstand the quip. It doesn't mean I'm thinking of banning you or anything near that--or anyone else, for that matter. I'm thinking of ghosts from the past when I uttered those very same words, followed by some very painful results...)

[caroljane]

Carol,

I just added an EDIT to my post. There's some more entertainment to be had.

But, to answer your question, I've been burned before (meaning here OL has been burned before) and the signs were all there. So I checked with my magic Search Engine Decoder Ring.

Michael

You can check for plagiarism on the internet? Damn, I better stop doing it then.

[Dglgmut]

One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.

Just commenting on Carol's resolution in my own words.

[caroljane]

lol.In one of Montgomery's best and most autobiographical novels, the heroine loses a prestigious literary prize to a plagiarist.The plagiary is only discovered later through the merest chance. I am glad that it is easier to detect now.

And this means that the university student plagiarists (and MSK, I have deduced that the dude you mentioned started his cut and paste ways there) will have to go back to commissioning original essays from actual writers and pay them a good rate.

[caroljane]

One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.

Just commenting on Carol's resolution in my own words.

Thanks, but I am not sure I totally qualify as part of mankind in O-land. Everybody is very nice but sometimes I suspect they think I am part savage.

[Dglgmut]

They do and you are.

Just kidding.

[william.scherk]

Emotions are not primary tools of cognition or for making rational decisions, they are the reward or consequence of a persons value system.

This is stated many times, and I still do not fully understand it. I have asked before if anyone can imagine making a rational decision without emotion, and I noted Damasio's work on emotional deficits (in the consciousness thread).

Blackhorse, have you read anything of Damasio's work with 'Elliot'? (first in book form in Descarte's Error)

I mention this so that you can find and examine a situation that puts the "not tools of cognition' / 'not tools of rational decision making' to the test.

Here is a teaser from a popular article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Feeling our way to decision

Elliot had a small tumour cut from his cortex near the brain's frontal lobe. He had been a model father and husband, holding down an important management job in a large corporation and was active in his church. But the operation changed everything.

Elliot's IQ stayed the same - testing in the smartest 3 per cent - but, after surgery, he was incapable of decision. Normal life became impossible. Routine tasks that should take 10 minutes now took hours. Elliot endlessly deliberated over irrelevant details: whether to use a blue or black pen, what radio station to listen to and where to park his car. When contemplating lunch, he carefully considered each restaurant's menu, seating and lighting, and then drove to each place to see how busy it was. But Elliot still couldn't decide where to eat. His indecision was pathological.

Elliot was soon sacked. A series of new businesses failed and a con man forced him into bankruptcy. His wife divorced him. The tax office began investigating him. He moved back with his parents. As neurologist Antonio Damasio put it: "Elliot emerged as a man with a normal intellect who was unable to decide properly, especially when the decision involved personal or social matters."

But why was Elliot suddenly incapable of making good decisions? What had happened to his brain? Damasio's first insight occurred while talking to Elliot about the tragic turn his life had taken. "He was always controlled," Damasio remembers, "always describing scenes as a dispassionate, uninvolved spectator. Nowhere was there a sense of his own suffering, even though he was the protagonist … I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, no frustration." Elliot's friends and family confirmed Damasio's observations: ever since his surgery, he had seemed strangely devoid of emotion, numb to the tragic turn his own life had taken.

To test this diagnosis, Damasio hooked Elliot to a machine that measured the activity of the sweat glands in his palms. (When a person experiences strong emotions, the skin is literally aroused and the hands start to perspire.) Damasio then showed Elliot various photographs that normally triggered an immediate emotional response: a severed foot, a naked woman, a house on fire, a handgun. The results were clear: Elliot felt nothing. No matter how grotesque or aggressive the picture, his palms never got sweaty. He had the emotional life of a mannequin.

This was an unexpected discovery. At the time, neuroscience assumed that human emotions were irrational. A person without emotions should therefore make better decisions. His cognition should be uncorrupted. The charioteer should have complete control. To Damasio, Elliot's pathology suggested emotions are a crucial part of decision-making. Cut off from our feelings, the most banal decisions become impossible. A brain that can't feel can't make up its mind.

Damasio began studying other patients with similar brain damage. These all appeared intelligent and showed no deficits on any conventional cognitive tests. And yet they all suffered from the same profound flaw: because they didn't experience emotion, they had tremendous difficulty making decisions.

In his earlier book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason And The Human Brain, Damasio described trying to set up an appointment with an emotionless patient: alternative dates are suggested and the patient pulls out an appointment book and consults the calendar. For 30 minutes the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates: previous engagements, possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything that one could reasonably think about. "He was now walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis, an endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and possible consequences. It took enormous discipline to listen to all of this without pounding on the table and telling him to stop," Damasio wrote.

Based on these patients, Damasio began compiling a map of feeling, locating the specific brain regions responsible for generating emotions. Although many cortical areas contribute to this process, one part seemed particularly important - the orbitofrontal cortext, a small circuit of tissue sitting just behind the eyes, in the underbelly of the frontal lobe. If this fragile fold of cells is damaged by a malignant tumour or a hemorrhaging artery, the tragic result is always the same.

Edited October 7, 2012 by william.scherk

[blackhorse]

William, when I say that emotions are not 'primary tools of cognition' I mean it the sense that man cannot make rational decisions strictly from an emotional POV. Man is a being of balance; logic and emotion.

[Matt Faherty]

William, when I say that emotions are not 'primary tools of cognition' I mean it the sense that man cannot make rational decisions strictly from an emotional POV. Man is a being of balance; logic and emotion.

This is not true. While it is true that we use emotion sometimes to guide our actions, doing so is either illogical, or only logical given our logical understanding of its use in certain contexts. For instance, my instinctual reaction to a man charging at me with an axe is an instance when it is rational to use emotion as my arbiter of action. Thus, there is a "primacy of reason" if you will.

[anthony]

Over and above that accurate instinctual response to danger, surely the objective is the alignment of emotion with cognition: to the extent it can be done - and with practise and confidence it is increasingly possible.

The alternative would be the one thing pulling against the other - and paralysis - or

responding blindly to each random feeling.

All emotions are a consequence of something in reality, I believe we agree.

Doesn't this mean each emotion then is an existent with its own nature?

I think a person may be eventually able to trust his emotions to react in the "right" or appropriate way, as an immediate assessment of any situation - according to his established virtues and values, and act accordingly. For example, the reaction to an other person's dishonesty may well be outrage, or disappointment, as befits one's own truthful standards - or, the reaction to one's own dishonesty could well be guilty shame with oneself.

Either way, one is motivated to consider, and correct or deal with it.

The 'loop' that I believe eventuates between the two would not suppress emotion, but encourage it; would not limit cognition, but enhance it. So: The more you feel - the more you think, and vice-versa. Emotion prompts attention of WHAT to think about, but not HOW to think.

[blackhorse]

whYNOT, I think values are both cognitive and emotional in origin. Cognitive because they are they are the product of human decision making, or their rewards and/or consequences are set by nature regardless of the emotional state, emotional because they direct the response of a given persons value hierarchy.

[anthony]

Sure. You're focusing on value, but it's still a "loop" of cognition-emotion.

That's what I'm driving at.

[blackhorse]

Ahhh...